Moving Toward the Next Kuiper Belt Target
Today we got another green light signal from the New Horizons spacecraft. It’s on the way to its second target in the Kuiper Belt, an odd little place called Ultima Thule. A green light means all the boards are good, the mission is still a “go” and the spacecraft is doing its thing.
Kuiper Belt History
Back when I was in graduate school (SO last century!) the Kuiper Belt was just really beginning to be observed by such astronomers as David Jewitt, colleague Jane Luu, self-described “Pluto Killer” Mike Brown, and many others. It was given the name Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt after two planetary astronomers Ken Edgeworth and Gerard Kuiper. They theorized the existence of a region in the outer solar system populated by “leftovers” such as ice-rock worlds and cometary nuclei. In 1987, Jewitt and Luu began looking for such objects and began finding them.
Since that time, others have been found, dubbed KBOs (for “Kuiper Belt Objects”), “Kuiperoids” and “trans-Neptunian Objects”. It happens to be home of Pluto, as well as the dwarf planets Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Sedna. Ceres, which is also a dwarf planet “lives” in the Asteroid Belt. There are other worlds “out there”. Some are candidates to be defined as dwarf planets at some point. Yet, there are probably many more that haven’t yet been detected. All in all, the Kuiper Belt is a rich treasury of worlds.
In recent times, people studying the dynamics of comets have come to realize it’s not the home of all short-period comets. They largely come from a “scattered disk” of nuclei that are associated with the Belt. So, there’s a lot more work to be done to understand and chart this distant realm of the solar system.
What’s Coming up Next
In a few months, New Horizons (currently sleeping its way to Ultima Thule) will wake up. That will happen in July. After that, it will be all hands on deck as the spacecraft gets closer. At that time, the cameras and other sensors will do their thing on the way to a late December 2018 encounter.
In the meantime, scientists are still analyzing the Pluto data. They’re also touting images the spacecraft took during its last “waking period” in December 2018. They weren’t of a planet, but rather of a star cluster about 1,300 light-years from Earth. While it’s not the best imagery of the cluster, it is the first imagery from such a great distance from the Sun. Not only did New Horizons snap that image, but it also got pictures of two other Kuiper Belt objects. The spacecraft will take images of as many KBOs as it can, adding to our store of knowledge about this distant region.